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96
The Views Regarding God and the Doctrine of Brahman
these, the chief ones run as follows : What is the nature of that māyā with the help of which God creates the world ? Does this world-creation depend on the acts performed by the mass of living beings or does it not ? Moreover, is the existence of God to be established chiefly on the basis of reasoning or on the basis of scripture ? And so on and so forth. These questions too have been answered by the sankarite scholars. And generally speaking, the common tone of their answer is to the effect that world-creation is a beginningless process, that in ever new kalpas (=world. aeons) God creates the world in conformity to the acts performed by the mass of living beings, and that all this stands proved on the basis of scriptures --chiefly Upanişads. As for reasoning, it is at the most useful for providing support to scripture. Thus in the bhāsya composed by san. kara---which is oldest among the available bhāsyas - Brahman comprising existence, consciousness and bliss is supposed to be of the form of the element God and the same has been demonstrated to be the materialcause as well as the efficient.cause of this mobile-cum-immobile world while refutation has been directed against the Nyāya-Vaiseșika etc, who posit God in the form of an independent element supposed to be the efficient cause of this world; at the same time, refutation was directed against the Sankhya doctrine which attributes actorship to prakrti supposed to be an independent elernent. Similarly, the view upheld by the anti-theistic philosophers was rejected on the ground tbat it was non-Vedic. Thus it was that among those advocating the doctrine of Brahman Brahman was established in the form of one possessed of absolute actorship and Godship.
However, even before Sankara there had been several commentators of Brahmasútra. All these commentators offered the same kind of commentarythis too cannot be said; even so, these commentators seem to have been unanimous about one thing. This point of unanimity was that none of them was, like Sankara, an advocate of the doctrine of Keyalādvaita (absolute nondualism) or māyāvāda (=illusonism); and even if there was such a one there is available no clear evidence in respect of that. They all, in the main, treated the element Brahman as something different from praksti and yet something eternal-undergoing-change. If the Sānkya treats prakřti as somcthing eternal-undergoing-change and the advocate of the doctrine of Brahman too treats Brahman as something eternal-undergoing-change, then what is there to differeatiate the two from one another ?-this question too must have presented itself to them. This precisely is why almost all of those commentators, while treating Brahinan as something eternal-undergoingchange, have derived the conscious-cum-non-conscious creation from the same, and yet have offered arguments and reasonings in support of the position that the essential nature of Brahman remains preserved in an
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